Email Marketing Tool

IVRCMO
Colaborador(a)

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

We recently sent out an important email to known contacts (who regularly receive direct emails from us) from a known sender on our team, "Ken." Despite these contacts always responding to direct emails from "Ken," the marketing email from "Ken" to about 250 confirmed contacts resulted in only a 20% open rate (a minimalist email with only 2 links and 2 images). A random sample of 10 recipients found that 9 did not receive the email -- and the email was also not found in their junk or spam folder.

Our connected domain's DNS is properly set up according to HS directions, and our IT team has confirmed this several times.

Sending a test email to MXtoolbox resulted in a failure of proper TXT and DKIM settings, however, SendForensics scored deliverability above 70%.

We've been noticing a slow decline of open rates over the past  year, but this is getting really serious:
A significant percentage of 250+ people who regularly respond to emails from us, appear to be not getting a marketing email sent from Hubspot.

What steps should we consider to fix this? And please, DO NOT RESPOND with something like, "have their IT department allow list" or something like that... because THEY ARE getting individual emails sent by "Ken" and the rest of our team.

 

1 Solução aceita
paxton
Solução
Equipe de Produto da HubSpot
Equipe de Produto da HubSpot

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

SORBS is a blocklist, which is a little different than a blacklist. They aim to put all marketing email shared IP's on their blocklist. HubSpot sends marketing email through shared IP's so they are accomplishing their aim by putting us on their blocklist.

 

Fortunately, SORBS listings cause virtually zero bounces (quarantines, spam folder placement, etc...). For example the SORBS bounce rate last month was 0.0011% of sends on affected IPs in August. This is low because the recipients that use SORBS service to filter spam are also agreeing to block third-party-sent marketing email, which many IT security professionals deem to be too aggressive.

 

They are rare, but if you are actually seeing bounces that reference SORBS, in general my advice would be to respect the security systems that the recipient put in place to protect their inbox. However, in the case that the recipient themselves expresses to your organization that they want your email, then you should--and I'm sorry for saying this--have them whitelist your portal's marketing IP's. They would need to make an exception for our marketing email as it is against their general email policy.

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41 Respostas 41
tymau16
Participante

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

It's very frustrating..other solutions have a much better email deliverability rate and HubSpot is the most expensive..LOL. They need to figure this out, besides saying get a dedicated IP address. 

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andrus
Top colaborador(a)

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

I know many companies have seen good results with Outfunnel (where I am co-founder) but it'd make sense to check out one of the more established tools as well (Aweber, Constant Contact, CampaignMonitor) - each have a 2-way HubSpot integration via PieSync. 

Andrus Purde | Outfunnel - The easiest way to connect sales and marketing tools
regal_eagle
Membro

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

We are experiencing these issues as well after migrating to Hubspot from another platform. We have seen dismal open rates on Hubspot vs. our other platform, and we willingly took any and all advice our account manager offered with no result - yes, this includes not sending to unegaged contacts, changing subject lines, segmentation, using "good" contact lists. It seems to me that Hubspot's high deliverability rates don't really apply to industries with stricter firewalls. We have asked about more advanced email sending capabilities that improve deliverability, like staggered sending, and our account manager hadn't even heard of the term. It's really time for Hubspot to come off their high horse on this one - I just don't think the problem is a possible "spammy" subject line but rather their use of sending IPs not really working for contacts within certain industries. The oversight on this issue is... shocking for a thought leader. But far worse, it seems that on this (and the other, unfortunately mounting, issues we are experiencing with Hubspot) we always end up in a place where the recommendation is that we, the customer, purchase an add-on or integration to make the platform more robust. @andrus while it's true that Hubspot has some content about email deliverability, our support experience on the matter indicates that this information is more applicable to B2C emailing. 

TheRealBritt
Colaborador(a)

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I'm going to test MailChimp this week and see what happens to the deliverability.  We are far too reliant on our email marketing program for it not to perform!  I forwarded to HubSpot feedback from a customer who isn't receiving our emails and did some digging on why not.  I don't think they've configured the shared IP's properly but HS is dancing around the issue.  Ugh.

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tymau16
Participante

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

We have had similar issues with email deliverability. The majority of our emails land in the Spam / Junk folder. We spend all this time working on email content, just for it to not be seen. Not cool, especially with HubSpot's price tag. 

andrus
Top colaborador(a)

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

Hubspot's deliverability should be solid. Could it be that the email content (eg spam trigger words in subject lines, sometimes even normal-sounding terms like "laser printer" or "special offer" can trigger junk filters) or text-to-image ratio is the culprit?

 

Hubspot has published great content on email deliverability, I've also written my own recommendations here

Andrus Purde | Outfunnel - The easiest way to connect sales and marketing tools
paxton
Equipe de Produto da HubSpot
Equipe de Produto da HubSpot

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

@tymau16 if you are finding that your HubSpot marketing emails are going to the Spam folder you should open a support ticket to get some advice to address that. This is atypical for HubSpot users to experience. Our mean open rates for all customers is about 30%. If your portal experiences open rates less than this your domain is at risk for filtering to spam due to graymail. 

 

If your open rate is anywhere from 15% or below I would look to this post for guidance how to address that issue.

IVRCMO
Colaborador(a)

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

In our situation, a large percentage of our emails were going to recipients behind moderately to significantly strict firewalls. Their IT staff's rules for email filtering seemed to be the issue.

 

Since moving to a different provider for email campaigns, we're no longer experiencing this issue.

TheRealBritt
Colaborador(a)

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

What provider did you switch to?  I'm going to test a different ESP, HubSpot's solutions don't work and take too long...  Would appreciate your help!

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TheRealBritt
Colaborador(a)

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

I've been using HubSpot for 2 months and over half my database isn't "engaged" anymore...  One of our new customers wasn't getting our emails and highlighted that the HubSpot emails weren't getting through and were ending up in quarantine.  Ugh.  What provider did you switch to?  Has it solved the issue?

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paxton
Equipe de Produto da HubSpot
Equipe de Produto da HubSpot

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

The most common reason why emails are filtered is due to a low historical open rate associated with that sender (typically tied to the domain that is sending) for this reason you should stop sending to the group of contacts marked "unengaged". By sending to these folks continuously over time, it drags your overall open rate downward and increased filtering (to the spam folder or other folders like "quarantine") will result. For a plan to address this issue check out my other post on Graymail.

TheRealBritt
Colaborador(a)

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

I'm not buying it.  My open rates plummeted overnight when I switched from Marketo to HubSpot and searching online it looks like this is a known issue.  

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andrus
Top colaborador(a)

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

Have you checked Hubspot Apps Marketplace for email tools that integrate well with Hubspot? Should be easy to run a 50-50 test campaign, or use another tool for the "unengaged" segment only.  

Andrus Purde | Outfunnel - The easiest way to connect sales and marketing tools
karo1
Participante

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

We are having the same issue and have been asked to contact our clients IT departments to whitelist the shared hubspot IP address - this is the "solution" we were given (lol).

 

Other suggested solution was to buy a dedicated IP address from Hubspot. 

 

We are using other platforms for communication with clients and addressed that are bouncing on Hubspot are not bouncing there. It is Hubspot's problem but somehow they put it on paying customers to resolve. 

 

 

josephine
Participante | Parceiro
Participante | Parceiro

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

We are experiencing the exact same issue. 

 

Our customers are complaining that they are not receiving our emails.

The range of public HubSpot IP addresses that have a 'bad reputation' have been flagged as spam and prevent our emails from being received by our actual clients. 

The 'solution' HubSpot provided us with is to purchase a 'dedicated fixed IP address' at a very high cost. 

 

HubSpot is at the origin of a conceivable known issue by using public IPs of low reputation and decides to make clients pay for the solution at such a high price. How is that possible?

TMc1
Membro

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

Hi - did you ever get this resolved? I'm having the same issue. 

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paxton
Equipe de Produto da HubSpot
Equipe de Produto da HubSpot

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

Also curious to know what impact they are seeing. A lot of blocklists may publish blocks on shared IPs but aren't actually used by filtering services so they don't cause any bounces.

 

If we notice higher than a 0.1% soft bounce rate for any blocklist then we will take action to delist the IP with that RBL (registered blocklist), and we will also work with the customer that caused them to block us in the first place. If necessary we will suspend them from emailing again to prevent it from happening again in the future.

 

In general though our overall delivery rate is always around 98% or more.

 

We have systems in plce to alert if drops occur and we take the same sort of actions to rectify the problem if that happens.

 

Dedicated Ip is great though, but only if your deliverability is better than our shared. If you do not have better contacts / engagement than the average customer on the shared then you should generally stay on the shared IPs. You also only really get value from a dedicated IP if you send over 20,000 emails per month.

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andrus
Top colaborador(a)

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

Do you know what's the share of customers affected? If it's less than 5-10% or only specific domains then this could be considered acceptable. Very few email marketing platforms that use shared email addresses successfully deliver more than 90% of emails (see here for stats). 

 

If this affects only a subset of customers with a particular email domain or email service provider, then emails are being blocked or marked junk due to local settings or IP being blocklisted. But I hear you that asking your customers/prospects to do extra work to receive your emails is a tall order.

Have you tried asking Hubspot to move your account to a different IP (that perhaps won't be blocked for these accounts)?

Alternatively, there's the cumbersome setup of using another email tool in parallel for the affected domains/contacts. Many email tools have good integrations to Hubspot CRM, so this wouldn't be a completely disjointed experience. 

Andrus Purde | Outfunnel - The easiest way to connect sales and marketing tools
IVRCMO
Colaborador(a)

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

Add three more people, just reported this morning, that did not receive the email, and also not in any Junk or Spam folder.

 

What's going on Hubspot?

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paxton
Equipe de Produto da HubSpot
Equipe de Produto da HubSpot

Sendability issues... Hubspot send IP is blocklisted

resolver

If you make a list given the criteria in this post how many contacts appear on it?

 

Ultimately, if you stop sending to whatever amount of contacts that is (which have an ROI of virtually 0) your overall open rate will rise, and you will minimize spam folder placement and/or bouncing due to graymail.

 

Also, DKIM is a no brainer. In your post you mentioned that MXtoolbox failed DKIM. Please ensure that you have set up both the TXT and the two CNAME records for proper DKIM authentication, and that those values match what is in your domain manager exactly https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/cos-general/what-is-the-updated-process-for-conne...

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